Tax Day with Allen West

Thanks to a quirk of the calendar, Tax Day fell on Tuesday, April 17 this year. The nominal date when taxes are due is April 15. On that day, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) took the stage at a rally in Wellington, Florida, and offered a stirring defense of economic freedom:

West denounced the sheer lunacy of President Obama’s spending and tax policy, perfectly tagging the now-defunct Buffett Rule as “insidious.” He talks about capital gains taxes and death taxes in a way that makes class warriors break out in hives. West’s point about the generation damage from confiscatory death taxes is particularly apt.

He reminds us that a world in which criminals use welfare debit cards to post bail is a nightmare Bastiat saw coming from over 150 years away. After dealing with a particularly lame heckler, West makes a crucial point about the way small business income artificially inflates the income of the owners for tax purposes, magically transforming middle-class businessmen into evil “millionaire” tax targets.

Looking upon the phalanx of new IRS agents marching from the bloated ruin of ObamaCare, West wonders, “Are we really talking about reforming and repairing the health care system, or is this just another tax bill?” He wryly notes that while the new “tanning bed tax” isn’t a big problem for him personally, he suspects many in his audience will find it outrageous.

West warns his audience about the approach of “Taxmageddon,” the largest tax increase in American history, set to slam into Barack Obama’s hideously weak economy in 2013. The Heritage Foundation published a bulletin on Tuesday warning that if this $494 billion tax hike is not stopped, “American households can expect to face an average tax increase of $3800, and that 70 percent of Taxmageddon’s impact will fall directly on low-income and middle-income families. Tax Freedom Day in 2013 will fall on April 28, not April 17. It will almost certainly move into May by 2014.

Opposing the path President Obama has laid out for us is a “moral decision,” according to Rep. West. “If you can look at your children, if you can look at your grandchildren, and bend them over the barrel, and say ‘I’m not working so you can have a bright future,’ then you will have just snapped the DNA of the American patriot. You will have just said, ‘we will not pass on the genome of liberty, freedom, and democracy to the next generation. You will have just said that it’s okay that America ends up going down the path of Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain, to the economic collapse that looms before us.”

West concludes by saying he doesn’t believe America will choose that path. We won’t have many more opportunities to choose another.